 I'm going to tell you that where I come from is called the Totonacapan. And the Totonacapan is this beautiful place with a very ancient area of Mexico in the state of Veracruz where I come from. I was kind of like that. You know, I used to be in bars of this picture. I guess I just passed that now. I was born in Jalapa in Mexico. I grew up there and I always liked to draw. I drew everything I saw. I will draw like these are drawings that my mother kept of me. I remember making these drawings. I was two and three years old, eventually four years old. And my mother will see that her sewing machine and she will make stuffed animals because she sold them so that she could make money. And I remember that she was really, really late that night and I will sit next to her while she was doing her sewing. And I will start drawing. Eventually, I will fall asleep and I will sleep with my head on the table. And then when I will finally get up after a few hours, there were these animals. Sometimes there were giraffes. Sometimes there were elephants or dogs and some of them were even bigger than I was. And it was this magic of drawing and falling asleep and then finding this zoo of animals that my mother had made. She kept some of these drawings. As I was getting older and older, then I started copying everything I saw. Now the thing is I was really shy. And maybe you guys are like that, you know, that when you are creating it feels like very intimate. It feels like it's something that you do on your own and sometimes for some of us it might be hard to share those things. I was like that. And so what I will do, I couldn't really ask someone to pose for me. So what I will do is I will go inside my bedroom and I will close the door and then I will look in the mirror and I will draw myself. And I did it again and again and again. I did so much that I eventually memorized the shape of my face and the lines that form my eyes and all those things so that with the time I was able to do it even without looking in the mirror. I drew a lot. And then I had some people that I admired how they did their art, like Jorge Gonzales Camarena. This was an image that was right in the front of the book of reading, the reading book in the first year of grade school. But when I was growing up I didn't have a library and I didn't have books like the ones that we have here in the United States, like children have in the United States. They were not a body of work that was offered to kids. Mostly I read things like that. Like these adult graphic novels that were so interesting to me because you can't imagine why but also because they are West Magnificent. I thought it was great. I thought like how can anyone draw like that? So I read all these magazines that my father bought almost every weekend. And then because there wasn't any else to read except for sometimes the cereal boxes inside of in front of me when I was having my breakfast. There came this time when I was in middle school I was about 12 years old in which we were assigned to read the incredible and sad story of Candida, Herendira and her grandmother, and then I was hooked. Then I knew that I was a reader. And maybe it's not like I had a complete conscience that I was a reader. But I wanted to read more because the stories were fantastic because they talked to me because I loved them and I remember reading more and more. Now like I said we didn't have like a transitional literature that will help me go through children's books, to adult books. We just went straight into things that sometimes I didn't even understand. I didn't have an immigrant experience that is gruesome like a lot of people that come and have to cross the desert because their belief and their passion to be here is so great that they will risk anything. I didn't have that. I didn't have to risk my life. I actually came in an airplane, you know, and I was living in my family's house, in my mother-in-law's house. And yet there is still that sense that something very important has been left behind. What I didn't know is that in that emptiness that is left behind there is also opportunity because now you can start filling with new things. For me it took me a long, long time to realize that I could do it. And things began to happen when one day my mother-in-law put my son and me in her car and took us to a place that will change my life forever. She took us to the public library. And when I entered the public library, we do have public libraries in Mexico, but there is nothing like what you have here. And when I entered the public library, I just couldn't believe it. There is this huge building with lots and lots of books, but what is even more amazing is that they have a children's book section. Like, what is that? What is a children's book section? Are you serious? Like, you just can go in there and look at all these wonderful books. I went inside and I grabbed the books and I will open them. And I could not believe that they would make of this sturdy paper on the covers and you open them and the paper where they print the stories. They are bright and shiny. And then the stories. A picture book is specific in its essence that it needs to be spare. It needs to go to the point. It tells a story with just the exact amount of words. And I will start reading these stories. And with the very limited English that I had, I will understand one or two or three of these words. Now, there were many that I did not. But just like children learn to read from picture books, I will then look at the illustrations and then I will start understanding, like, finally the meaning is shining in front of my eyes. Eventually, what I did is I realized, first of all, I don't know how to write a story. If I wanted to do something like that, I would need to know how to write a story. I would also need to learn, I don't know, like maybe to draw. These are some of the images of the, some of those first books that I saw at the library. Well, I was in love. And I thought, I would love to have books like that. Can I make them myself? And I mean, of course I can. Because if you go to the public library, in fact, even in the children's book section, you can find a book that tells you how to write those books. It's true. And as I was exploring my life and how I felt in San Francisco, like the waves, like the cold waves covering me, or the experience experiencing the growth of my son, I began trying to make pictures that I thought maybe they could be part of a story. And what I did is I practiced. I will set my dining table. As soon as we finish eating, I will put things away. And then I will bring that new paper I bought at the art store and all those new brushes and these new paints. And I will just go and look at picture books that I like. And I will try to recreate what I saw. Now remember, I told you that I admired some of this work when I was a kid. They came back. They came back once I was here. Because what I had mostly was a great need to reconnect with who I was and the things that were familiar to me. Because I was living in this great place that I told you before, then I realized that I could bring all those colors to me if I actually painted them myself, if I put them in drawings or in illustrations. I realized that all the food that I couldn't eat, I could just go and paint it right there. And if I didn't have the birthday parties that my mom used to do for us, all they had to do was just paint them in an illustration. So I'll tell you that we have this idea, at least I did, that to be an artist, to be an author, you kind of have to be born with it, right? It's like almost like you have little stars on your hand that tell you, like you are an artist when you are born. Like almost the science I write that, well, I don't think anybody is born like that. When I met Alma Florada, I told her I'm interested in books and she said, oh, I'm giving a class. And it's about writing children's books. You want to come to the first class, you can come and hear what we are doing. So I came to the first class and it was so excited and they were exploring autobiography and they were going to start writing, everybody was going to start writing their own story. And I love it so much, like all the creative energy that was there and Alma Flor's passion for the writing and everything that when the class was over, I went and it took all my courage to say, do you think I could come next week? Because I wasn't enrolled at school because I couldn't even pay for a class like that. And Alma Flor was so, so generous that she said, yeah, yeah, you should come next week. I wrote some stories about my childhood and you know, my stories always need a lot of help to be clear and for the English to be good enough and all of that and the Alma Flor read the story and one thing that she told me that was very, very important to me, she said, why Eugene? You are a writer. Oh, and doesn't that change anybody's life? But because we also do it with our children and I think that it makes me think just how important it is to have service, to pay attention. You don't need to tell someone who is not something that he or she is a writer or an artist, but you can always observe, we can look and say, you really like to paint, you like to write. You know, say what we see so that the other person can have his or her own interpretation and decipher herself that maybe this is something that really, really calls them and maybe this is something that they can do and what Alma Flor said is like, you really write and you can really write and then they made me think, that's right, I think I can write, even though my English is very, very imperfect, even though I don't know yet how to tell the stories. The fact that she had an observation for me and she pointed and she said was essential in my life. I'll tell you that I kept going to the public library almost every day. It was in the way to my son's school and also we had the Western Edition Branch Library for a week, for the streets from our house. That was an incredible place. I'm gonna tell you why. Because that place became my home more than my own apartment. Because in that place, I didn't need to interact with anybody, I didn't need to have explanations, I didn't need to answer. I was terrified of the telephone because I couldn't understand what people told me. There I could just go and open the books and read them and I would read them to someone who didn't care if I didn't read them, well, wish was my son. He didn't care. We will go, it will take me some time to walk to the library. Much more longer, it will take me to walk than for him to start crying. So then I will have to leave the library. And then I will come back eventually, maybe the next day I will walk there. And then we will start reading books and then he will start crying again. But every day that we did that, he will take a little longer before he start crying. So little by little, we were making that place a place where we could stay. And something marvelous happened there. He was two years old. We had been going all this time for about a year. He was two years old when Nancy comes and say, so do you know that you can have a library card? What is that? He said, actually, she didn't say that I could have, she said, my son could have a library card. And I said, first of all, what is that? And how can a two year old have anything here at the library like something like owner? And she said, yeah, yeah. You know, you get this library card and with your card, you can take books home. Are you serious? I can't take books home. So yeah, and at the time, there were like a limit of 22 books. I know that it keeps changing, but the time it was 22 books and she says, and you can have your library card too. And we immediately signed for our cards. And that day, not that day because then I realized actually that together we could take 44 books together, right? So the next day I came back with my shopping cart. So we will go back and forth with all these books. And also we spend a lot of time there because we've been practicing so much. Now we couldn't stay at the library for many, many hours. And there were times when they would come to me and say, we are gonna close now. But you can come back tomorrow, we are gonna be up and early. And then as my son was getting accustomed to stay that long, sometimes I will say, okay, let's go back home now. And he would say, why are we leaving? They are not closing yet. We did that, we did that so much that in fact, yes, the library became my home. That was a place not only where I fell in love with books, with picture books, with children books, but where I learned how to read in English, where I learned to make all these wonderful things I'm telling you about, and also where I learned who I wanted to be. And where do I wanna go? I wanna make books just like that. I wanna write the stories. I wanna tell the stories I have. I wanna make paintings, which I have never done before, right? So how do I do it? Go look for a book at the library and there it is. And I practice at home and I will start having things that kind of like, other things I didn't like, but eventually I began taking myself seriously and thought like, would it be possible maybe that someone might like my story is not just me. I got a call from an editor and they say, you know, I saw your work in one of these conferences and we are thinking that maybe you would like to consider illustrating a book about the story of Cesar Chavez. I knew Cesar Chavez in Mexico and they say he was brave and he was strong because he was a boxer. And that was Cesar Chavez and he was very, very famous. So one day I'm walking at the Mission District and walking there and then suddenly there is this huge street that is called Cesar Chavez and I'm there with my stroller just looking at it and thinking like, why will anyone in the United States will name a street after a boxer? Only here, right? Only here. But then I got the manuscript and I was in, oh, from there came Harvesting Hope, the story of Cesar Chavez. I should confess that I'm in love with this book. I am in love with this book because I learned about Cesar Chavez again the same way that children learn about anyone. And as I was creating this book, Cesar Chavez became my hero, a real hero. This person is not only because he's my color, it's not only because he speaks Spanish because he comes from the same place I come from. It is because he's a person who believes that everything you wanted to do, you could accomplish it with peaceful ways. Did he say that it took more creativity to do things pacifically? Is that a word in English? We say pacífico in Spanish. Something is pacífico, it has peace. That you could, it wasn't even more difficult, that it required you to think more, to be creative so that you could solve your problems without having to fight without, I mean, without having to hurt physically someone. And as I was creating more books, then I start thinking like, so now where do I make stories from? Does that ever happen to you? Like, okay, I have great ideas and yet I don't know where they are. Exactly. And that's how I felt. But what I have learned through the years is that we are dreaming with those ideas. We have been filling ourselves with memories, with likes, with fears, with passions, with things that make us wake up at night, with dreams. And sometimes when I create my books and my illustrations, well, a lot of things come exactly from the things that I love the most. From those things that I am familiar with, for some things that I'm afraid of. Stories that I heard when I was a kid as well, like this was in one of my textbooks, Francisca La Muerte, gave me inspiration as well as some of the celebrations at home. And of course, my son, to create a book about celebrations, to create a book about birthdays, about life. And this is the case of just a minute I took the Alan Counting book and just in case. As I've been creating, inspiration comes from everywhere. And ideas come from places I don't even necessarily imagine. And like this one, this is me. And as you can see, that's how my mother used to do my hair. And she will actually make the dress. She will make everything we wore. She will make, at home, she will make everything from the tablecloth to the lamps, to the bedspreads, everything. She was very, very creative. And that gave me inspiration for a book called Little Night. When I was growing up, I wanted to have my hair all the way to the floor. I imagine myself walking with my hair, following behind it, just like sweeping the floor with my hair. So I was trying really hard when I was little to have that long hair. And my mother was happy because she could do anything to me, like she did like drencitas and chonguitos and all of those things. She spent a lot of time doing my hair. And also creating the ornaments that she will put on my hair. And that was the inspiration for, like this is Andresa, that she, that she crocheted for me. This was the inspiration for the story of Little Night in which grandmother, in which mother sky is putting her child, Little Night, ready to come out and be the night. Sometimes inspirations come from scary things too. I love scary things. This is a sample of how my drawings look when I first make them. This is a book called Los Gatos Black in Halloween, which is one of my favorite books. I'm gonna tell you why. Because Marisa Montes, who was a writer, created a story that was such that I could give my own interpretation. And you might recognize some of them. That will be Apachuco, Tin Tan. This is Diego Rivera. This is Jose Cortiza Dominguez, which was a freedom fighter for the independence of Mexico from Spain. And this is Cantinflas. Yes. And this is a child taking from those paintings that Diego Rivera made of the struggles of the workers in Mexico. And then these are my aunts. I just remember, I told you that I was shy about sharing when I'm creating, sharing with other people. So sometimes what I will do is, again, I will close the door of my studio and I will use the mirror or now I take photographs so that I could use them as reference for creating some of the characters in my books, like that one. Can you see the resemblance? Anyway, Ladder to the Moon is a book that was difficult for me to imagine how to illustrate best because we as illustrators, we are also telling the story. And we have to say it clearly because it is for children to be reflected on it because they need to understand it. And this was a complex story. This is a story that was written by Maja Suturo Ng, which is the sister of President Obama. And she very, very passionately wanted to tell a story which talked about service, about community, about how getting together will become stronger. She wanted to tell a story that reminded us that we all have stories, that we have them with us, that we have them inside us. And when we tell our stories, we can connect with other people's stories and be one because there is so much in common among all of us. And how we all have stories and we tell them in different ways. We tell them through music and we tell them through drawing and we tell them with our voice and with writing and with many, many different ways. Now, who is familiar with Lucha Libre? I'm gonna tell you something about Lucha Libre. When I was a kid, okay, Lucha Libre is a show. Lucha Libre is a resident show in which you have a group of luchadores, the wrestlers. You have two different groups. You have the group of the technicos which are the ones that follow the rules. And then you have the group of the rudos. The rudos are those who don't follow the rules. And what they do is they embody, they enact this ancient battle between the good and the bad. With that inspiration, Lucha Libre, comes the story of Niño. Niño who wrestles the world. When I was creating this book, I was thinking of, first of all, things that I was afraid of when I was a kid. All the scary things. How do you conquer those fears? What can you do to conquer those fears when you are just a little child? Right, like these enormous monsters and things that we imagine. How do you do it if you are only a kid? And I had to remind myself, children are actually very, very powerful. They are so good at what they do. They are good at imagining. They are good at playing. They are experts at toys. They are good at having friends and playing with them. I mean, there are so many things that children are good about. I thought, I think I know how a little Niño, a boy, could conquer those enormous monsters. And monsters such as la momia de Guanajuato. Have you, and if you have seen las momias de Guanajuato, because my father took us to see las momias de Guanajuato when I was a child. And let me tell you, that was experience. There is my momia de Guanajuato. Now there are other things that were scary to me, like las cabezas o mecas. Have you seen this? They were dug out and they discovered that they were as ancient as 3,000 years old. Now, when they discovered them, little by little, there is starting to be an idea of who they are or what they were made. But mostly no one really knows. And there are stories. When we don't know something, there are stories come and take place. There are stories that, why do they have a helmet like that? They are probably from another planet. And there he is. And now Niño's gonna have to defeat cabezas o mecas. You can see that everything has to do with where I come from. Like it happens to all of us. We have those things inside. We just bring them out and we create. That was about, let's see, a year, two years ago. I was asked to create an illustration for a book that is called America the Beautiful. And I thought it came just on time. Because after nearly 19 years of living in the United States, I have not become a citizen. And when this offer came, I realized America has been a wonderful place to me. It is my land. This is a place where I have been growing up. This is the land where I found my dreams, what I wanted to make. This is the land in which I raised my son. America is beautiful to me. So I would like to see my prices to America. And I did it through this book. The other thing I did at that moment is that I became a citizen. As a citizen, I went with my son to vote for the first time. The two of us, we went together. He, because he was 18 years old and he could vote. And me, because I was a new citizen. The other wonderful thing that happened is that with my son going to college, I was actually free to go to any place I wanted to go. And I have always loved my country, Mexico. My country of birth, Mexico. And I realized that I had been living in the United States for long enough to have contributed and to have learned. And now if I came to Mexico, wouldn't it happen the same thing that happened when I came here? That when I came here, I had a backpack with me. I had this luggage in which not only I had some clothes, most of them clothes that I borrowed because I didn't think I had the good enough clothes to come to the United States and some items. But I also had with me stories and memories and all the treasures of my culture, all the things that I love and the things I fear. All of those came with me. And they accompanied me through my journey of learning here in the United States. If I go to Mexico, what will I take with me? What will be in my backpack as I cross the border back to Mexico? And who are the people that I can show these marvelous things that I have learned in this country? How could I do that? It became a big desire of going back and now with everything that I have acquired here to be able to hopefully share it and enjoy it and celebrate it and honor it. So about six months ago, I decided to go to Mexico. I'm leaving back in Jalapa now, where I was born. Being Mexican and being American, everything is double. The gifts are double, but the things that you give are double as well. I have two languages, I have two cultures. And when I give, I can also give in Spanish as much as I can give in English. It's like having everything two times. So what I can do right now is I can actually offer you my home in Mexico too. And when you come, you just find the door and please come and visit. I'll be there working. And we will have dinners and lunches and things together. And we will celebrate with great things happen and in color, in colorado, este cuento se ha acabado. Muchas gracias.